Community-based multiple-gate screening of children at risk for conduct disorder

The present study employed a multiple-gate screening procedure to identify children at risk for the development of conduct disorder. Measures of cross-setting disruptive behavior and parent discipline practices were administered in sequential fashion to screen a population of 7,231 children attending suburban elementary schools. Convergent validity of the respective gating measures was confirmed by significant correlations with adjustment constructs. Analyses of covariance performed between positive screens, negative screens, and low-risk comparison children on adjustment constructs at each gate supported the discriminative validity of the gating procedure. Hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that the gating measures were predictive of diagnostic ratings of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder that were obtained 18 months following the screening. A stepwise logistic regression analysis indicated that the best predictors of high-risk group membership were variables related to family process, including poor family communication and involvement, poor maternal coping skills, and an external parent locus of control.This study was supported by grant MH-46584 from the National Institute of Mental Health.     

Negative priming effects that are bigger than a breadbox: Attention to distractors does not eliminate negative priming, it enhances it

In a series of experiments, we examined the effect of requiring subjects to attend to distractors in a test of negative priming. This was accomplished by using a referent size-selection task in which subjects were instructed to name the larger animal and to ignore the smaller animal in a word pair. The result was a quadrupling of the standard negative priming effect, suggesting that negative priming not only occurs for attended distractors, it is actually enhanced. We demonstrated that this enhancement of the effect was not due solely to increased latencies in the referent size-selection task, because neither decreasing base response times in other referent size-selection tasks nor increasing base response times in typical color-selection tasks substantially affected the respective negative priming effects. Although these findings can be accommodated within current theories of negative priming, they challenge the basic assumption that the negative priming effect arises because the critical item was ignored or not attended to on the prime trial.     

Using HyperCard and Apple events in a network environment: Collecting data from simultaneous experimental sessions

HyperCard is a useful tool available to teachers and researchers who have access to Macintosh computers. Version 2.1 of HyperCard, in conjunction with the Macintosh Operating System 7, includes some significant new capabilities for users with multiple computers in a network, as is common in many teaching laboratories. This paper describes a HyperCard stack that allows users who wish to run HyperCard-based experiments on several computers simultaneously to conveniently retrieve experimental data from those remote computers onto one program, and to perform several other useful tasks in a computer network.     

Word-by-word analysis of observer agreement utilizing audio and audiovisual techniques

The purpose of this study was to compare audio and audiovisual techniques of analyzing stuttering behavior using a recently developed index of agreement (Young, 1975). Twenty speech pathologists identified moments of stuttering for ten adult stutterers using both audio and audiovisual methods. Although no statistically significant differences existed between the two conditions, the listeners had more difficulty identifying moments of stuttering during the audio condition when mild stutterers were used.     

The Concomitant Effects of Phrase Length and Informational Content in Sentence Comprehension

Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects that length manipulations may exert. The results demonstrate that length not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which itself affects modification preferences. Our findings suggest that the same length manipulation affects multiple sources of constraints, both structural and pragmatic, which can each exert differing effects on processing.     

Cross-cultural and gender differences in childhood amnesia

In two experiments, we examined cross-cultural and gender differences in adults' earliest memories. To do this, we asked male and female adults from three cultural backgrounds (New Zealand European, New Zealand Maori, and Asian) to describe and date their earliest personal memory. Consistent with past research, Asian adults reported significantly later memories than European adults, however this effect was due exclusively to the extremely late memories reported by Asian females. Maori adults, whose traditional culture includes a strong emphasis on the past, reported significantly earlier memories than adults from the other two cultural groups. Across all three cultures, the memories reported by women contained more information than the memories reported by men. These findings support the view that the age and content of our earliest memories are influenced by a wide range of factors including our culture and our gender. These factors must be incorporated into any comprehensive theory of autobiographical memory.     

Hearing by eye: how much spatial degradation can be tolerated?

In the McGurk effect (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976 Nature 264 746-748), illusory auditory perception is produced if the visual information from lip movements is discrepant from the auditory information from the voice. A study is reported of the tolerance of the effect to varying levels of spatial degradation (videotaped images of a speaker's face were quantised by a mosaic transform). The illusory effect systematically decreased with an increase in the coarseness of the spatial quantisation. However, even with the coarsest level (11.2 pixels/face) the illusion did not completely disappear. In addition, those participants who did not experience the illusion nevertheless showed the effects of auditory-visual interaction in their clarity ratings of the auditory stimulus. It is concluded that auditory-visual interaction in visible speech perception is based on relatively coarse-spatial-scale information.     

Longing for Ex‐Partners out of Fear of Being Single

This research investigated whether people who fear being single have a more difficult time letting go of ex‐partners following a romantic breakup. Data were collected in a cross‐sectional study (N = 209, 64% women, M_age = 30 years old) as well as a 1‐month daily experience study of individuals who just went through a romantic breakup (N = 117, 44% women, M_age = 27 years old). Findings from both studies revealed that those with stronger fear of being single (Spielmann et al., 2013) reported greater longing for their ex‐partners. Pre‐ to post‐breakup analyses revealed that fear of being single increased after a breakup, regardless of who initiated the breakup. Within‐day analyses revealed that longing for an ex‐partner and attempts to renew the relationship were greater on days with stronger fear of being single. Lagged‐day analyses provided support for the conclusion that fear of being single increased longing and renewal attempts over time, but longing and renewal attempts did not influence fear of being single. These findings suggest that fear of being single is a particularly useful construct for understanding the romantic detachment process.     

The weight of expectation: Implicit,rather than explicit,prior expectations drive the size–weight illusion

In the size–weight illusion, small objects feel heavier than identically weighted larger objects. This illusion is thought to be a consequence of how one's prior expectations can influence conscious perception—lifters expect the large object to outweigh the small object and subsequently experience it as feeling lighter than they expected it to be. Here, we directly examined how a familiar object's identity can affect how heavy someone expects it to be, and how these expectations will influence subsequent perceptions of heaviness. We describe two novel weight illusions induced with familiar objects. In one condition, participants judged the weight of a set of similar-size objects with very different natural weights (a polystyrene sphere, a tennis ball, and a cricket ball), which had all been adjusted to weigh the same amount as one another. In this condition, participants experienced a small, but reliable, weight illusion, with the lightest looking ball feeling heavier than the heaviest looking ball. In the other condition, participants judged the weights of a different set of balls, which were different sizes, but similar natural weights, to one another (a golf ball, a foam soccer ball, and an inflated beach ball). Again, participants experienced a perceptual illusion, but in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, participant's perceptions matched, rather than contrasted with, their explicit expectations such that, even though they expected the golf ball to outweigh the beach ball they perceived the golf ball as feeling heavier than the beach ball. The effect of object mass appeared to dominate the effect of conscious expectations, suggesting that contrasting expectations of heaviness are not necessary to experience weight illusions and that current models of this robust perceptual effect must be revised.     

Is the area measure a historical anomaly?

Green's well-known area theorem establishes an equivalence between the area under the yes-no ROC curve and the percent correct of an unbiased observer in a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task with equivalent stimuli. In this article, we show that this conversion from yes-no detection data to hypothetical performance in a 2AFC task is unnecessary: The same yes-no detection data that are used to compute the area statistic can always be used to compute the percent correct of an unbiased observer in the yes-no detection task itself. We also show that the ROC curve may not be the ideal graphical device for many investigators. A more natural representation of the difficulty of a discrimination task is obtained by plotting the distribution of the posterior betting odds under equal base rates, which can be estimated from their distributions under unequal base rates. Finally, unlike the area measure and other traditional detection theory statistics, both the yes-no percent correct measure and the odds distributions generalize in an obvious and direct way to classification paradigms with more than two responses (e.g., identification).